Trump's Great Wall Might Have a China Problem

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has made illegal immigration from Mexico a cornerstone issue for his campaign.

He has promised to build a "great" wall along our southern border to keep Mexicans from crossing illegally into the United States in order to be paid unfairly for back-breaking work as dishwashers, domestics and farmhands.

Now U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports an absolute explosion in the number of undocumented Chinese immigrants detained for allegedly trying to enter the United States in the agency's San Diego sector.

Maybe they need to reach their rich cousins in the San Gabriel Valley.

There were five Chinese nationals caught at the border in the San Diego region in the 2014 federal fiscal year, a CBP spokesman confirmed. There were 48 in the 2015 fiscal year. So far this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, there have been an estimated 663 apprehensions of Chinese along that stretch of the SoCal border with Mexico.

"High-skilled and high-value emigration from China is rising fast, while low-skilled and unskilled emigration is stagnant — a divergence that has been widening since the late 2000s," the institute stated in a summary of that report. "The emigration rate of China’s highly educated population is now five times as high as the country’s overall rate. China’s wealthy elites and growing middle class are increasingly pursuing educational and work opportunities overseas for themselves and their families, facilitated by their rising incomes."

Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.